I have to say its nice to have the delete option. I just did a double post and the delete option came in handy. Too bad most forums don't have this I see double posts just about everywhere.

Oh, and the default colors are fine for me, beats the red on black any day, plus I can actually read the threads now.

Red on black actually wasn't the default template on the old Forum... you actually ended up using an alternate template somehow! The default for the old one was white and light blue, similar to the default on here.

I'm actually using the "BacknBlack" template here, which is black and gray with white text. I'll probably take the best traits of some of the lighter and darker templates, and create a couple of new templates like "HypnosForumLight" and "HypnosForumDark" and get rid of all the other ones...eventually.

This Forum includes an optional feature called "Karma" which allows users (at least somewhat established users, who have registered and posted a few times) to give positive or negative karma points to users who contribute something positive or negative to the Forum.

So...

Someone who creates an interesting topic, or who posts an insightful post, or a good CD review, might receive positive karma.

Someone who breaks a Forum rule, or posts something inappropriate, or even who posts a "waste of space" comment, might receive negative karma.

I've turned on the karma option so we can experiment with it a bit. If it's used frivolously or spitefully, I'll just disable it, but if it can be used for a sort of "peer review" to encourage people to contribute, and discourage people from acting like fools, then we'll keep it.

The karma points show up under your name & avatar, each time you post.

Bill Binkelman

Is there any way I can make my avatar, which is actually an animated GIF, animate? I've seen people at other forums be able to do this. Not a big deal, but it'd be cool if I could. By the way, for those who don't know, that's Peter Stormare, who was in Fargo, among others. The picture is him "in character" as the pitchman for Volkswagen during one of his "oh snap" commercials. Hilarious stuff, IMO.

Is there any way I can make my avatar, which is actually an animated GIF, animate? I've seen people at other forums be able to do this. Not a big deal, but it'd be cool if I could. By the way, for those who don't know, that's Peter Stormare, who was in Fargo, among others. The picture is him "in character" as the pitchman for Volkswagen during one of his "oh snap" commercials. Hilarious stuff, IMO.

I recognized that guy, but I didn't know his name. Those commercials are great... saw 'em on YouTube.

Umm, as for letting people use animated GIFs for avatars... I can see that your avatar file is PNG format, so I imagine if you upload the file to the Forum's database, it converts them to uniformly-sized PNG files. It's possible that if you make your avatar a link to an off-site animated GIF file, it will leave the file format intact... not sure, but you can try it, if you have web hosting space to store the GIF on.

The more I live with this "BacknBlack" theme, the more I consider making it (or some close variation) the default theme on this Forum.

How do people here feel, generally, about "light" themes versus "dark" ones? Generally I like darker themes but the pre-designed ones tend to be cheesy and less functional than the default themes on forums like this, which always tend to be light and innocuous (light blue and white or gray).

This "BacknBlack" theme seems to have all the functionality and legibility of the default theme, but it's more attractive and fits better with the main Hypnos site. Speaking of which, one of my longer-term goals is to integrate the Forum into the main Hypnos site, so the main web site's navigation table on the left side (links to the news page, list of CDs and artists, and the Hypnos store, etc.) will appear on the left side of the Forum. We'll see how difficult that is to accomplish.

I've been all through that web site, and that's where all these themes come from except the top 3.

There are several,like Mesh, that I like in several aspects, but would like to use them as a basis for some modifications. Many of the themes out there have all kinds of annoying ornamentation. Even Mesh had some annoying graphics at the top that I wiped-out.